Freedom Summer
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Search complete. 23 mentions across 15 episodes found for "Freedom Summer".
Sep 17, 2026
Kate MishkinHOST
Fighting for labor rights and women's rights and voting rights, Jews often joined forces with Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups to push for social change.
Kate MishkinHOST
In 1964, Jewish civil rights activists famously participated in Freedom Summer, an effort to register Black voters.
Kate MishkinHOST
And you've probably seen the iconic 1965 photos of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching from Selma to Montgomery alongside Martin Luther King Jr., both of them wearing floral leis.
Jeffrey K. SalkinSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And it came out of a genuine sense of several things.
Kate MishkinHOST
Fighting for labor rights and women's rights and voting rights, Jews often joined forces with Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups to push for social change.
Kate MishkinHOST
In 1964, Jewish civil rights activists famously participated in Freedom Summer, an effort to register Black voters.
Kate MishkinHOST
And you've probably seen the iconic 1965 photos of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching from Selma to Montgomery alongside Martin Luther King Jr., both of them wearing floral leis.
Geoff SalkinGUEST
And it came out of a genuine sense of several things.
W. Kamau BellHOST
Yeah.
Robert ReichGUEST
Um, but I lost track of Mickey, and so part of the book is my discovering that, and I didn't discover this until I was a freshman in college, 1964, Mickey in the summer called Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Mickey, whose name is Michael Schwerner, was, was one of the three Civil Rights workers who were brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
Robert ReichGUEST
And when I discovered that the person who was my protector that summer when I was seven or eight had been brutally murdered by the Klan, it was a turning point for me, because bullying was more than just me personally being bullied.
Robert ReichGUEST
Bullying was white people, white supremacists, Klan bullying Black people.
Robert ReichGUEST
I mean, in a way, I think the, uh, I didn't think about it in logical terms.
W. Kamau BellHOST
Mm-hmm.
Robert ReichGUEST
But as some of you know, that Freedom Summer of 1964 was a predecessor for a lot else that happened in this country.
Robert ReichGUEST
I mean, that was, you know, the, uh, many of the young students who were in the Freedom Summer, they came back to their college campuses, like Berkeley.
Adrienne LarkinGUEST
But it didn't really penetrate into my brain.
Adrienne LarkinGUEST
What really was starting to change me was the women I was around, you know, the nuns who were brilliant women, the nuns who had gone down to the South and been part of Freedom Summer, the nuns who went to Harlem on the weekends to tutor kids, my classmates who were firemen's daughters and cop- daughters of cops and first generation college who were going to Harlem to tutor kids and had very different political views than I did.
Adrienne LarkinGUEST
But also they wanted ...
Adrienne LarkinGUEST
They were assumed that they would be working women.
Audrey WattersGUEST
But at the same time, you ask about the civil rights, you know, there are the other things going on.
Audrey WattersGUEST
There was, in the 1960s, in the 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a lot of activists, SNCC activists, wanted to organize people in Mississippi, black folks in Mississippi, to do literacy, with literacy campaigns so that they could gain the right to vote because, of course, Mississippi had egregiously racist policies blocking black people from voting, literacy tests at the polls.
Audrey WattersGUEST
So they did a campaign for literacy, and they thought one of the leaders of SNCC, Robert Moses, thought, maybe we'll use teaching machines.
Audrey WattersGUEST
He had been a student of some of the psychologists at Hamilton College, were actually where Skinner had actually graduated himself.
Wayne FedermanGUEST
I mean, I guess the only place the mob didn't really run too much was the the Borscht Belt up in the mountains of the Adirondacks upstate New York, where kind of like Jewish comedians were performed there during the summers.
Noel BrownHOST
Let's move on really quickly to a very important event in the Freedom Summer or the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi where all these marches took place.
Noel BrownHOST
This is a very big kind of high-water mark point for the civil rights movement.
Noel BrownHOST
There is a bombing of a church called the Mount Zion Church, and three young men are sent to investigate it, Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner.
Fred SmithGUEST
When he got to Washington, DC as a student at Howard, it was there that he got particularly active in issues of racial justice.
Fred SmithGUEST
Like a number of students, he went down to Mississippi as a part of Freedom Summer.
Fred SmithGUEST
And that's where he was assigned to Sunflower County to work on issues of integration and
John RossHOST
voting rights.
John RossHOST
When John Harris arrived, he and his compatriots went door-to-door encouraging Black people to register to vote.
John RossHOST
The day after that, the church that served as the group's headquarters was firebombed.
John RossHOST
Shortly after their arrival, they also learned that three other young activists participating in Freedom Summer just a few counties over had disappeared.
John RossHOST
And the world would eventually learn that they were murdered by Klansmen, including a police officer.
Reiland RabakaHOST
Their little bodies were blown to bits while sitting in church.
Reiland RabakaHOST
During Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared.
Reiland RabakaHOST
Their bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam.
Reiland RabakaHOST
They had been murdered.
Heather BoothGUEST
And again, it calls us to organize.
Stephen RohdeHOST
Heather, based on that young experience back in 64, how did you move on from Freedom Summer?
Heather BoothGUEST
A lot of things happened, but I returned to my campus in Chicago.
Heather BoothGUEST
And one of the things I first saw how women were also being treated.
Robert ReichGUEST
His name was Mickey.
Robert ReichGUEST
And I learned when I was a freshman in college, long after I needed any protection from bullies, that Mickey, my childhood protector, when I was eight years old, had gone to Mississippi during Freedom Summer.
Robert ReichGUEST
His name was Michael Schwerner.
Robert ReichGUEST
And he, along with two other civil rights workers, had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for basically registering voters.
5 more episodes mention Freedom Summer.
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